8 488J. Arbuthnot, An Inquiry into the Connection between the Present Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms (1773), as quoted in Snell, Annals, p. 173. Cf. the clergyman for Naseing, Essex's comment that enclosure locally had "a worthless crew changed to industrious labourers." Young, General Report, p. 156; see also pp. 391-92. Those living near large commons were considered "irregular in their habits" and "were often the most distressed and needy of the surrounding population." Commission on the Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, p. lii.

2 492Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing, pp. 34, 182-83; Snell, Annals, pp. 17-19, 72-73, 78-80, 334-36; Norma Landau, "The Regulation of Immigration, Economic Structures and Definitions of the Poor in Eighteen-Century England," Historical Journal 33 (Sept. 1990):541-72; Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, pp. 108-16. There is an ominous similarity between the pre-1795 certificate system and the pass system imposed on slaves, the main differences being the latter was proportionately much less often enforced, especially in urban areas, that it was tied to giving aid to the poor, not a restriction on movement for the sake of control alone, that a local unit of government, not a master/employer/owner granted it, and the difficulties imposed in instantly spotting violators because of a lack of racial differences between the laborers and those who enforced it.

5 495J.C.D. Clark says enclosure "may even have tended to increase the numbers of living-in servants, for the effect of more efficient agriculture was to increase, not reduce the demand for labor." This assumes not only that the given enclosure did not replace arable land with permanent pasture, but generally discounts how enclosure increased unemployment by driving more workers into local labor markets, especially in winter, since they could no longer eke out a living off the local commons. English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime, Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 68.

1 501as in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, p. 74. Even when something was accomplished, a lack of incentive for further employment could exist when one ends up overwhelmed with a surplus inventory of gravel. One area in Yorkshire employed so many at stone-breaking that they piled up enough stones to last over eight to ten years after only three or four months. Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843, p. 29.